Sandy Carmichael: Pride of Lions and Scotland who battled through era of 'licenced thuggery'
- Published
Sandy Carmichael won 50 caps for Scotland
Sandy Carmichael, the proud son of West of Scotland, won 50 caps for his country across a span of 11 years from the late 1960s into the late 1970s. In today's money, with games coming thick and fast at international level, that's a century and more.
He won only 19 matches with Scotland, but that raw statistic does him no justice. Loosehead or tighthead, a game of flowing rugby or a bloody battle, Carmichael could mix it in all circumstances.
The Scot was a Lion in 1971 in New Zealand and a Lion again in South Africa in 1974. He went toe-to-toe with all the greats and all the mad men of a violent era and, if he didn't always finish on the right side of the scoreboard, he always won respect. He won it in giant fistfuls from those who went up against him and knew how formidable he really was.
Sadly, the man is no longer with us, but the stories remain and, while those stories are told, Carmichael will endure. Without question he belonged to a different sporting era, but you could just as easily say that he belonged to a different sport. It's still 15 versus 15 out there, but so much has changed, on the field and off. Some for the better, some for the worst.
He once told a story about his second Lions tour, the epic trek to South Africa in which the tourists went unbeaten for the first and only time in their history. It's a tale that shows what the freewheeling days of amateur rugby were like and why the memory of those days is cherished in the face of some of what we see today, the latest nadir being the most recent Lions trip to South Africa, arguably the most joyless Test series of them all.
Carmichael took us back to the summer of 1974 and the week before the second Test in Pretoria. The Lions entered their hotel rooms to find 24 cans of beer and 200 fags sitting on their beds, gifts from the Boks, who'd lost the first Test in front of their own people and couldn't afford to lose the second. The invitation to drink and smoke themselves half to death before Saturday was resisted - not that the stash went to waste you understand.
The Lions won the second Test (and the third) and, in their downtime in the days that followed, they loaded their haul on to a 1948 Dakota plane and flew to Kruger National Park, where they drank for Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales.
Gallivanting about the game reserve one night, Carmichael recalled hearing something stirring in the bushes. Out walked a pride of lions, the four-legged type. "Should we be here?" asked the slightly alarmed prop. "You're okay," said one of the park rangers. "They've already eaten."
That's the world that Carmichael existed in. Hard games followed by boozy sessions that helped forge bonds with players that lasted his whole life.
From Carmichael, you always got the sense that the rugby was great but that the thing that really made it special for him was the camaraderie, the sessions, the friendships, the happy chaos of those times. Many from that era would probably say the same.
They can't give you chapter and verse on particular games, but they'll talk brilliantly about the people they got to know along the way. That's what was important and that's what shone through every time Carmichael spoke about his life and times in rugby.
That and the violence. Rugby in the here and now is savagely physical, but there are referees and TMOs watching like hawks for foul play. Rugby in Carmichael's day was largely lawless. At times, it was dirty. At other times, it was criminally vicious.
On his debut for Scotland, an Irish player bit a chunk out of Carmichael's ear. In a later game against France, the giant cartoon baddie that was Gerard Cholley repeatedly gouged Carmichael's front-row mate, Ian McLauchlan.
Sandy Carmichael (back row, sixth from left) had his 1971 Lions tour cut short by a brutal attack
Head-butting Cholley in retaliation had not deterred the 19 stone monster, a former amateur boxer who once laid out six different players in an on-field fight. The Scots would now up the ante on Cholley by kicking him in the head next time they got him on the floor. They did - and Cholley thought nothing of it. Carmichael recalled that McLauchlan ended up in agony because in the act of vengeance the nail on his big toe came off.
Carmichael, like so many others of his vintage, revelled in these stories. Some of them would have been apocryphal while others were undoubtedly given a dramatic flourish, some top-spin to make them even more gruesome and entertaining. They're rooted in reality, though.
It's easy to believe these yarns because enough video exists of what it was like back then. Carmichael described it as "licenced thuggery." And if anybody knew the truth of that then it was Carmichael.
Every piece written about him over the past 50 years will have had the Battle of Canterbury at its heart. It was the summer of 1971 and Carmichael was probably at the peak of his powers. He looked a certainty to make Carwyn James' Test team in New Zealand…until Canterbury.
The home bruisers were on a mission to soften up the Lions ahead of the Test series. What unfolded was a scandal and a terrible moment in Carmichael's life.
From the second he received a backhander to the eye early in the game, he sensed that something dark was about to happen. Not long after, he got kicked in the face at a ruck. Then there were the scrums.
To his dying day, Carmichael refused to name the player who inflicted some damage on him, but everyone has known the name for years. "Alister Hopkinson (the late Canterbury player) was propping against Sandy and he just kept punching him in the face," recalled Fergus Slattery, the Irish flanker.
Hopkinson was a busy boy. A moderate prop who Carmichael would have taken to the cleaners in a fair contest, his mission was to take out a player that the All Blacks would have worried about in the Test series to come.
And why stop at one player? He smashed Slattery in the face and concussed him badly. Slattery didn't know where he was but played on.
Peter Dixon, the England back-row, got concussion later on and, like Slattery, was totally oblivious to what city he was in. He played on too. Two of the Lions back-row were out of it at the same time. Nobody really knew what brain injury was in those days. A wet sponge was the antidote to all ills.
There were punch-ups at scrums, lineouts, rucks. The Irish prop, Ray McLoughlin, saw Canterbury back-row Grizz Wyllie lashing out at Gareth Edwards and McLoughlin punched Wyllie in turn and broke his own thumb. That was the end of his tour. McLoughlin would have been a Test starter.
Carmichael was ruled out of the tour too. The punishment he took in the scrum was cruel, his cheekbone getting fractured five times by Hopkinson's frenzy. Every time it was brought up in the years since, his fellow players wonder why Carmichael didn't retaliate or call for help from his team-mates, who even though they were fighting their own battles would have wreaked revenge on Hopkinson in the blink of an eye.
"Some saw it as a flaw in his character, others saw it as a great strength," said the 'Mouse' McLauchlan. "He was a rugby player, not a boxer."
The pictures of Carmichael's horrifically damaged face have gone into Lions history. Writing in his book of the tour, The Victorious Lions, John Reason put those graphic images into words.
"The sight of Sandy Carmichael's face as he lay collapsed on the masseur's table in the Lions dressing room after the match against Canterbury will stay in the memory of all who saw it for as long as they live. His left eye was closed and a huge blue swelling of agonised flesh hung out from the cheekbone like a grotesque plum. His right eye was a slit between the puffed skin above and below it. He was quivering with emotion and frustration. His hands shook as they tried to hold the ice packs on the swelling."
Carmichael was robbed of a place in Lions history that summer. It was the most high-profile incident in his career, but it wasn't the end of him.
He was less than halfway through his Scotland career at that time. In his first Test match after the horrors of New Zealand, he scrummaged against the notorious Frenchman, Armand Vaquerin. The Scot was immense in that win at Murrayfield.
Come the 1974 Lions tour, Carmichael was selected again. Fran Cotton was the starting tighthead, but Carmichael made a big contribution on that trip as a dirt-tracker of huge experience and nous.
He carried on through 1975, 1976 and 1977, the curtain coming down on his international career in the early weeks of 1978. His later years were dogged by ill health and now his passing is mourned by all who knew him and who watched him on his way to the highest level a rugby man can possibly reach.